Still, I have to make sure. I could try.
I head to the bedroom to see her shoving everything in her suitcase, a blank expression on her face.
“Do you want me to go with you?” I ask her.
She barely looks at me. “You can’t go. You have rugby.”
“I know I do but this is important.”
She shakes her head, grabbing a pair of jeans out of the laundry basket. It’s all happening so soon. She’s leaving.
It would be completely selfish to fear that she might not ever come back.
“You stay here,” she says. “This is…I have to go be with my brothers. We have to figure out what to do.”
“I know,” I say softly. “But I could make something work. If you needed me, you know. For support.” The truth is, I probably couldn’t make anything work. Not right now, before our first game. But if she needed me to be there, if she wanted me there, I would do whatever I could.
“You stay here,” she says again.
I nod. “Okay. I just wanted to make sure.”
I go to my computer and quickly book her a ticket on the next flight out of Edinburgh. There’s one that leaves tonight, stopping over in Newark and then LA, but at least she’d get to leave as soon as possible.
And just like that, both our worlds completely change for the second time today. We’re both silent and reeling on the drive over to the airport, with Lionel and Miss Emily in the back seat to keep me company on what I know will be a very lonely drive back home.
Everything is happening so fast, my heart and mind can barely catch up. One minute I’m begging her to stay, to give me a second chance. The next minute she’s leaving and it’s out of our hands. She’s leaving and what we are as a couple, who are to each other, is being left completely unresolved. But that’s the least of our problems right now and right now I don’t think I deserve to dwell on anything that remotely resembles myself.
It’s all about Kayla. And that’s where my heart breaks all over again. Because I know how much she loves her mom, how much responsibility she feels for her. I just want to be with her, by her side through all of this. I want to be the rock she so desperately needs. I want to be the hand she reaches for at night, the chest that she cries into.
And skip, skip, skip goes time.
I’m getting whiplash.
We’re now at the security gate and she’s already said a teary goodbye to Lionel and Emily in the car, and she’s all checked in and now we’re standing a few feet apart and the short distance between us feels a continent wide already.
“I know I’m going to regret this moment,” she says quietly, her tone still flat, in shock.
“What do you mean?” I ask, reaching for her hand. It’s cold and limp in mine.
She blinks a few times, then studies my face, her eyes pausing at my nose, my lips. “I know that in the future, when things settle down, in whatever way, I’m going to look back at this moment and I’m going to regret that I didn’t take it all in. That I didn’t see who was standing in front of me. That I’m going to wish I could recall your face.” She shakes her head and a single tear spills down her cheek. “None of this is sinking in. That I’m leaving. I don’t know what’s going to happen. With her. With us.”
I raise her hand, flipping her palm up and kissing it. “Your mother is going to be fine. You’ll get there and she’s going to be fine. She’ll know you’re there. She’ll pull through, okay? And us. We’ll be fine too. You’ll come back to Scotland when she’s better, love.”
But as soon as I say the words, I see the look in her eyes. The look that says she doesn’t know. The look that said that maybe she was planning on leaving anyway.
Sorrow carves a path through my chest.
She was never planning on staying.
It takes all my strength to stop from collapsing to the ground, right there in the airport.
“I’m sorry,” she says to me.
I try to smile. I fail. “Don’t be.”
“I love you, you know.”
My vision blurs. “I love you too.” But my voice cracks and it’s all too obvious that I’m being decimated from the inside out.
This is probably the last time I’ll ever see her again.
And now I know I’ll regret this moment too.
For not forcing myself on her plane.
For messing everything up and preventing us from having a chance.
For letting her go.
I can’t let her go.
With tears in my eyes, I grab her face and kiss her hard on the lips, letting all my love, all my cares, all my pain melt into her, as if she could take all of me with her.
I let out a soft sob against her mouth, my hands starting to shake.
This is the end.
We’re both so blindsided.
She pulls away from me first, sniffing hard, mascara underneath her eyes. “I have to go,” she whispers.
Then she turns away.
Walks away.
Disappears behind the security partition.
And I’m lost in the distance between us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Kayla
The flight attendant is telling me to buckle my seat belt but I barely hear her. I can barely move my fingers, they are so cold. I feel like a block of ice, numb to the marrow, but I think it’s keeping me alive, keeping me from losing my mind to worry and grief. So I welcome the way I move, slow motion, underwater. I hope it wraps around me for all the time to come.
If I try and think about any of it, it creates cracks down my middle and I am trying so hard to hold it all together. On one hand there is my mother, in a coma, on the threshold of life and death and none of that would have happened if I had been there. It’s my fault through and through that this happened and I have no one to blame but myself.
On the other hand there is Lachlan, the man I love, the man with demons I can’t fight, that fight me back, and I left him. I left him in Scotland and I left our relationship broken with no chance of repair. I might never see him again and that too, even for all his faults and his self-ruin and his terrible addictions, feels like a death as well.
Shut it down, I think to myself. Bring up that big black heart and shut it all down.
It’s a shame. But it’s the only way I’m going to get through this in one piece, even though I know I’ve already left a vital part behind in Scotland.
When my plane finally lands in San Francisco, I’m a walking statue. The only thing that gets through is seeing my brother Nikko, along with Stephanie, waiting in arrivals.
“Oh, honey,” Stephanie says softly when she sees me, running toward me with open arms. She holds onto me tight, sniffing into me and it takes so much to not break down and lose it. I have to stay strong though, because if just seeing her makes me cry, I’m not going to get through the next few days.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, pulling back. Her eyes are swollen from tears. “Toshio called me and told me what happened, said Nikko was going to pick you up. I had to come along.” She looks around me. “Lachlan couldn’t come?”
I shake my head. I can’t even explain.
She winces. “It’s okay. I’m here. We’re all here for you. Nicola, Bram, Linden. We’ll get you through this.”
I nod, appreciating it more than anything. I look over at Nikko and give him a soft smile.
Nikko is the second oldest, a really smart software engineer with a wife and a toddler. He’s always been the quiet one, the calm one, the old soul, and I’m glad he’s the one who came to get me. Nikko always provides the right amount of comfort.
“Kayla,” he says, embracing me. “I should have been there. We should have done more.”
I shake my head. “No. I was wrong to leave.”
“No,” he says adamantly, pulling back. He stares intently at me. “Kayla you have done so much for her. So much. Her sons just haven’t been there and we should have been. We should have never let you take on so much by yourself.”